Enhancing Business Communication with Group Decision Support Systems

Group Decision Support Systems are helping many orga-nizations to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of group meetings. In addition, multilingual Group Decision Support Systems can support groups using many differ-ent languages by automatically translating group mem-bers ’ comments. In this paper, we describe this new technology and demonstrate how it can enhance business communication. Meetings have become a fact of life in organizations.Studies have shown that managers may spend up to 70 % of their time in meetings (Mintzberg, 1973). Tra-ditional, verbal meetings have suffered from a lack of participation, groupthink, and inefficient communica-tion. Many meetings may be enhanced using a Group Decision Support System (GDSS) that reduces or elim-inates many of the problems associated with traditiona